After a lot of moaning and complaining, I have finally dislocated my thumb from my more interesting parts, and learned how to use a spindle. Thanks Kerstin! At least I got the hang of it, but the result is a bulky, scrunchy string of lard, not the even, fluffy yarn I pictured. Eh. I guess the word is practise, practise, practise, but when am I supposed to find the time for that, huh?

When we were kids, we would sit and comb wool in the fireplace room at the museum where my mother works. What good it did was a bit unclear, it was something you did "in the olden days" and sufficiently violent to boot, and if you were lucky the sharp combs tore your hands and gave you a taste of medieval suffering = tough. On the bright side, it didn't seem quite as naaasty as chewing skins or eating eyes, two other things my pedagogical ethnologist of a mother told us about. "Sucks to live in the stone age" I thought with cheerful spite, and combed away.

Today I have four paper bags of uncombed wool hanging from a beam in our - fortunately - rather dry and decent basement. "You have to be careful with uncombed wool, it might hold some creepy-crawlies" Maria said, and I hope for once that she is wrong, I'll be traumatised forever if I cram my hands into the fluff and grab a squirming nest of bugs. Exactly how I will finish spinning all that wool, nobody knows for certain. When I brought it back home on the train from Lisa's mother in Norrland it felt so good, "I have enough to last for a while now" I thought, fondly eyeing the IKEA bag where straw and random sheep droppings poked out at me. Mwah! Now, I'm mostly anxious about those bugs which multiply so fast in my imagination, and I'm a bit scared to check out the "big stash", the amount which has not been kept in my apartment.

I'm eagerly waiting for the spindles Alex has made for me, but if I know myself (and I do) I will have learned with the one I have by then, and any other will feel wrong somehow. I'll get back to you on this, stand by for now.